Saturn

About

The gas giant Saturn is the sixth planet from the sun and the second largest planet in the solar system. It is the farthest planet from Earth visible to the naked human eye, but it is through a telescope that the planet's most distinctive feature can be seen: Saturn's rings. Saturn is comprised of both a sphere and its 2 dimensional counterpart the circle or disk. The object intersected and surrounded by the plane: a sculpture in relation to a painting.

The pagan deity Saturn castrated his father with a stone sickle and devoured his own children. Leader of the Titans, he presided over a pre-civilisation golden age through magical uncanny power - a monstrous proto-Freudian figure, chillingly evoked in Goya’s famous painting.

These references provide a framework for two artists to bring their practices together. Painting, represented in Hulson’s tense pictorialism, will confront sculpture, in Schady’s queer-pop bricolage: the circle slicing through the sphere. Both artists adopt a medium-specific approach while persistently disregarding any programmatic orthodoxy about those media. Put together they evoke the spirit of Saturnalia, harnessing black humour and the grotesque with playful malevolence. Sculpture will consider painting and vice versa and both will devour the other.

Both artists also use moving image media and performance as means of extending the complex notions of time within their respective disciplines. They orbit each other across parallel dimensions, just as, in the infinite time of the universe, the sphere and the circle are eternally bound in the figure of Saturn.